Abuse of power – Minister on the rampage

Institutional malfeasance is not new to Ghana’s public and civil services. Generally, the victims of such conduct are pockets of the general population, in a variety of different forms, but usually outside of the institutions themselves. But when such malfeasance is directed inwardly, at one of their own for no reason at all, by a person serving the country on behalf of the President of the Republic of Ghana, it bodes dire consequences for the entire country. Time and again, government officials, especially political office holders, like Ministers, have wielded their batons of personal vendetta with a vengeance, on civil servants they perceive to have been responsible one way or the other for some personal infraction on them in the past. This constitutes abuse of power, for the Ministries and public offices are not personal armory, to be wielded willy nilly, to unleash mayhem on the very people such offices are supposed to protect.

Such is the case with the Minister of Health, Dr. Kwaku Agyeman-Mensah, who seems to have descended on staffers at the Ministry with a vengeance, not because such people may have violated some important rule, or committed some egregious crime against the state; at least, the Minister is not disclosing the reasons for his actions, which leaves the matter to much speculation and inference. He is dismissing staffers, asking others to proceed on leave, instructing others to hand over their jobs to others, in most cases in disregard of civil service procedures. A case in point is one concerning the Head of the Public Relations Unit whom he ordered to leave simply because “he cannot work with him”. Now, granted if that is how the Minister feels, but the office of Minister should not be ran on the basis of one’s feelings, and used to settle personal scores in order to cost people their jobs, unless of course the gentleman has egregiously violated the law or civil service regulations. Where do such Ministers get the power to play “God”, such that they believe they can permanently damage the life on an individual with such brazen abandon? It is something else, perhaps laudable, if the Minister’s actions were in response to investigations uncovering corruption and other malfeasance within the Ministry, or even if a staffer committed some other action of high moral turpitude, which is almost a routine occurrence these days, Ghanaians will be first to applaud even such high-handedness; but this current situation is worse than the Spanish Inquisition without the sham trials.

Further investigations appear to now provide some answer to whence the Minister of Health derives this enormous BIG stick. Persons speaking confidentially because of their fear of reprisals quote the Minister as saying that his appointment as Minister was engineered by a powerful chief in this country, hence that the President of the Republic of Ghana cannot remove him from his post. If this is true, then perhaps, it is the reason the Minister of Health can act with such brazen effrontery. From my point of view, it is an insidious mentality, a personal circumstance mentality; one which has historically saddled this country with incalculable losses in human capital due to arbitrary retributive dismissals, transfers and re-assignments, to settle personal scores. It is different if a person has infringed a rule. Still, I believe the President is the highest appointing individual in this country. No one is asking that he should groundlessly fire the Minister; in the same way, the Minister should not subject staffers to such erratic dismissal or re-assignment. Vanity has a way of wreaking self-destruction on politicians, and the Minister of Health is not insulated from it. Yet, serious questions remain regarding his stewardship of the Ministry.

The persecution of individuals, by a cabal of operatives who have perfected the art of feeding the Minister with lies and obstructing access to the Ministry’s hierarchy of officers, while forming a cauldron of nefarious operations around the Minister is also quickly becoming an institutional practice especially at the Ministry of Health. Such is the atmosphere of vilification and subterfuge, that those aware of the prevailing circumstances liken them to a case of cannibalism, in which other officers believe simply that their survival depends on their ability to destroy the careers of others; and they are matched in their wickedness only by the Minister’s own appetite for victimization or vengeance.

At the time of going to press, a number of key officers at the Ministry have also been instructed in ways that are questionable and disturbing. For example, the Transport Manager was summarily ordered to proceed on leave, under mysterious circumstances, without proffering any explanation whatsoever. The apparently high-handed decision comes in the wake of allegations of decidedly anti-tribal directives targeted at specific ethnicities within the Ministry.

In another recent development, the Acting Director of Policy Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation was suddenly asked to handover to another person, a decision so irregular that it stunk to the high heavens. Within 24 hours, the orchestrators of this move, fearing a backlash and possible exposure, connived to surreptitiously get a reversal of the earlier decision. Despite the hasty reversal, the atmosphere of fear it engendered now pervades the entire Ministry headquarters offices in Accra.

Still another incident unearthed by our investigations is that a storm is brewing in the External Aid Coordination office, in which the External Aid Coordinator is being harassed and persecuted, in a bid to engineer a transfer of his duties and responsibilities to another person. Further investigations reveal that a plan hatched by a group of operatives, who have taken the malicious sabotaging of colleagues in the Ministry to an art form, are busy, moving themselves into so-called “desirable jobs” or trying to force a seizure and transfer of these jobs to cronies, with the complicity of the Minister himself.

What do all of the four victims above have in common? They are all “Northerners”. To many, it sounds far-fetched, that under a “Northern Presidency”, this should happen. I am first to declare that any action which quacks and looks like tribalism, should be banished from the machinery of government and public office. Further, simply because a northerner is President doesn’t mean northerners should be protected even if they do bad things. Anyone who breaks the law, irrespective of who is in power, must face the law. Yet, it is happening, in a way that under other dispensations previously in this country, tribes even remotely connected to the tribes of high public office holders would not be touched. It may be purely coincidental, but they fit too tightly within the same time frame and the same ethnicity to be considered differently. And in all of these wranglings, firmly situated in the centre is the Minister of Health.

No one is saying the law should be set aside. In fact, the law should be allowed to work, such that anyone, including these civil servants, can avail themselves of due process to confront their accuser(s) before a properly constituted internal, independent panel, or if necessary, in a court of law, without prejudice. Unfortunately, what is happening here is akin to “Mob Justice” without the “mob”, the stones, sticks and shouts of “Let the blood flow”. This is the cycle of vengeance that is destroying our country, in which politicians ruin each other and the country, by vigorously engaging in petty squabbling while the nation’s problems fester – poor electric power generation, poor quality education, a dislocated economy, fuel price hikes, bad roads, a leaking procurement process that is hemorrhaging national coffers, and might I add for good measure, extremely poor healthcare delivery services. If these political appointees spend a tenth of their time tackling the nation’s problems with one-hundredth of the vigour they spend persecuting others for past personal infractions, this country would be better off. Instead, this is what we get.

Contrary to the notion that the electorate has a short memory span, many remember some of these incidents. President Mahama must set a higher standard for public office holders by how he tackles some of these worrying developments. The Code of Ethics he asked Ministers to abide by has been cast aside, and in its place, some list of persons to persecute is in effect, by which some Minister gets a chance to play God, dismissing and moving public servants around as if they are pieces in a chess game. For once, let this country, its officers and their actions be guided by objective criteria and the rule of law, not the personal vilification that is unfolding. Let citizens, all citizens, including government officials, who fall afoul of the law, have due process; let all civil servants who break rules and procedures in the civil service, face the remedies provided for in the civil service regulations, or even the law, not the jaundiced reprisals carried out by individuals who believe they can shift pieces in favour of their protégés. For today, you may be the chess master; tomorrow, you too will be a spectator, or worse still, the chess piece, and not a King, a Bishop or a Knight, but a lowly Pawn, with no power to affect change, to make things happen or prevent things from happening. On that day, you will remember this article and this moment, when you arbitrarily put someone else on the sidelines, rendering them just as helpless.

Francis Dery

Email: deryfrancis@yahoo.com